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Quick Answer: While Indignation’s characters and dialogue closely follow the original novel by Philip Roth, certain changes were made to adapt the story for the big screen. Some changes were minor, such as combining multiple characters into fewer personalities. But the culmination of all changes, both small and large, shifts the story’s focus from the Korean War to a doomed romantic relationship.

Pulitzer prize-winning author Philip Roth has a difficult voice to capture on film. Roth’s descriptive novels are laden with historical detail and literary digression, the cerebral voices of his narrators tend to take precedence over the dialogue, and he’s not shy with profanity or sexually explicit content. Yet there are two Roth adaptations coming out this year: American Pastoral (2016) and Indignation (2016).

Indignation parallels Roth’s own youth, telling the story of a working class Jewish boy from Newark, New Jersey, who goes to a conservative college in the Midwest in 1951. Once there he bumps heads with the Dean and falls hard for a fellow classmate.

Overall the movie faithfully captures the voices of the novel’s key characters, largely due to the fact that important scenes of dialogue were taken verbatim from the novel. But it has a trickier time capturing the voice of Philip Roth. Roth was an unabashedly political writer who used small personal stories to capture the emotional undercurrent of major historical events. In the film, Roth’s sense of merging the personal with the political is largely lost in what becomes a narrow love story.

Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon in Indignation (2016)

While the core narrative is kept intact, writer-director James Schamus’ screenplay streamlines the story to make it work as a film, resulting in major shifts in the story’s themes and message.

Here are a few of the differences.

Marcus’ Education

In the film, Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman) is a recent high school graduate who received a scholarship from his temple to attend Winesberg, a small college in Ohio. In the novel, Marcus Messner is a transfer student, after having spent a year at a local college. Marcus decides to transfer for his sophomore year to Winesberg, and his family does need to pay the tuition.

Logan Lerman as “Marcus Messner” in Indignation (2016)

In both the film and the book Marcus matriculates to escape his increasingly over-protective father and to avoid the Korean War. However, the Korean War looms larger in the book, and this is a key difference in the adaptation. In the film Marcus is determined to study hard and become a lawyer, and his eventual encounter with the war comes as a surprise to the audience. In the book Marcus is also a pre-law student, but he fully expects to be drafted into the war. All of the boys at Winesberg must attend ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) classes in order to prepare for the conflict. Marcus intends to take more than the required number of ROTC courses, reasoning that if you only take the required one semester then “on graduating you would be just another guy caught in the draft and, after basic training, could well wind up as a lowly infantry private with an M-1 rifle and a fixed bayonet in a freezing Korean foxhole awaiting the bugles’ blare” (p. 33). If he takes more than one semester and can qualify as an officer, he will have a better chance of being transferred out of the war zone.

Olivia Hutton

Indignation’s depiction of Marcus’s troubled love interest Olivia Hutton (Sarah Gadon) is largely faithful to the novel’s character. However, Olivia’s ultimate fate is unknown to us in the book. While the film opens with an image of an elderly Olivia alone in a nursing home, in the novel we never see Olivia after she leaves Marcus’s hospital room.

Also, in the book, Olivia is pregnant when she has her nervous breakdown. Taking out this detail for the film adaptation makes Dean Caudwell’s insistence that Marcus could have impregnated her seem misguided. The update also changes Olivia’s character and how we perceive her: in the novel, her pregnancy means that the Olivia cheated on Marcus, and the rumors of her promiscuity may be justified, whereas the Olivia in the movie is a victim of slander.

Sarah Gadon as “Olivia Hutton” in Indignation (2016)

Dorm Life

In the film Marcus has two roommates: Bertram Flusser (Ben Rosenfield), an off-beat bohemian who is playing Malvolio in a production of Twelfth Night, and Ron Foxman (Philip Ettinger), a straight-laced student who loves his LaSalle Touring Sedan more than he does most people. Each of these characters is a combination of multiple roommates from the book.

In the novel Marcus has two sets of roommates: Flusser is one of the boys in his first room, and Foxman is an approximation of Elwyn Ayers Jr., the student with whom Marcus lives once he transfers rooms. In the book Marcus moves out of his first room after fighting with Flusser over the fact that he plays his music late at night. Marcus then moves out of this second room when Ayers degrades his love interest, Olivia. In the film Marcus only changes rooms once, after he and Foxman fight about Olivia. This makes Marcus’ large confrontation with Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts) seem more unwarranted, since the Dean is concerned about his switching rooms only once as opposed to (in the novel) twice in a short period of time. And because the meeting seems unwarranted, the aggressive way that the Dean interrogates Marcus from the get-go (especially about how his faith plays into his roommate troubles) makes Dean Caudwell seem more openly anti-Semitic.

Tracy Letts as “Dean Caudwell” in Indignation (2016)

In the film the audience does not see much of Flusser and Foxman once Marcus moves out. In the book we learn what happens to each of these characters: Flusser is revealed to be gay (a fact only alluded to in the film) and possibly in love with Marcus. Ayers dies at the end of the novel, after he takes his prized LaSalle out in a blizzard to try to outrace a train and crashes.

“The Great White Panty Raid of Winesberg College”

Towards the end of the novel there is an enormous blizzard, during which most of Winesberg’s male student body goes on a violent panty raid. They break into the girls’ dormitories and ransack them, screaming and throwing the undergarments out into the snow. In his reprimanding lecture to the male students, the university president reminds them of the war: “Beyond your fraternities, history unfolds daily— warfare, bombings, wholesale slaughter, and you are oblivious of it all. Well, you won’t be oblivious for long! You can be as stupid as you like, can even give every sign, as you did here on Friday night, of passionately wanting to be stupid, but history will catch you in the end.” (p. 222)

As a result of this episode, several students are expelled, meaning that they will no longer be exempt from the draft. Their reckless behavior and the university’s harsh reaction lead these young men directly to war.

Point of Focus

The cinematic adaptation of Indignation tells a narrower story than its source material. While the film focuses on Marcus’s tragic romance with Olivia and his tense relationships with his parents and with Dean Caudwell, the novel examines how Marcus’s story relates to the events and culture of American society in the 1950’s. In the film, the war is background noise: it gives Marcus purpose and gives his love story a tragic ending. In the novel the war is the story, and Marcus’s story is so tragic because we know he’s only one out of millions of young men who had their own equally complex and hopeful lives cut short by the draft. The film tries to manifest this aspect of the novel by adding a scene not present in the book — when Marcus and his family sit shiva for a young man who was killed in the war — but a moment like this does not have the same continuous impact as Marcus’s internal monologue in the book.

Without the steady presence of the war and with some of the other details altered, in the film Marcus’s contentious relationship with Dean Caudwell becomes surprising. The two represent opposing worldviews with equal fervor. Their first meeting in the film is as crucial a moment as it is in the novel – it is over fifteen minutes of dialogue (lifted almost verbatim from the page) in which Roth was able to explicitly lay out the conflicting philosophies, religions, traditions and tensions of the era. But in the film this meeting of the minds feels less inevitable, more out of the blue.

Confrontation between Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts) and Marcus Messner (Logan Lerman) in Indignation (2016)

[SPOILER AHEAD]

The same can be said for Marcus’s death: in the novel the omnipresent Korean war makes his death feel cosmically ordained, like it is a part of a larger national tragedy, whereas in the film his decision to go off to war is as sudden as the bayonet strike that kills him. The war scenes, in the very final minutes of running time, almost strike us as a senseless, harrowing appendix to a separate story.

While most of the differences are small, the overall result is that the film does not communicate the same message about the pervasive fear and sorrow of the military draft that was so pervasive in Roth’s college years. The adaptation of Indignation has a harder time making its 21st century audience feel the constant dread of war that was woven into the fabric of the mid-20th century. Instead, the story becomes a tragic, intimate bildungsroman — the story of one young man and not many. Still, if today’s audience finds it harder to relate to the historical reality of the draft, this can only be a good thing.